Books black-marketing

Books black-marketing

Selling books has been a hen that hatches golden eggs almost every morning and evening these days at the time when everyone seems to be looting the consumers in a broad-day light taking advantage of the helplessness of lawlessness prevailing in the country. Since ‘the forum for the conservation of consumers’ welfare’ has been passive, the consumers are being cheated at every shop all the time. The shopkeepers are cheating the customers with fancy price.

Cheating the customers by sticking stickers on the real price of books has been proved after the office of district administration raided on some of the book-stalls of Pokhara based on the complaints lodged by the guardians.

Scrubbing the real price with black sign-pens, the shopkeepers were found using other price-stickers and also hand-writing on the other side in the raid. Showing the artificial shortage of books and providing less number of books, guardians were also vexed going to the stalls from time to time.

Sending the guardians to a particular book-stall with the book-list has given a rise in the black-marketing of the text books. Schools also do so in greed of commission from everywhere like dress, text books, bags, stationery, shoes, ties, belt, etc. Because the book stalls make a bomb at this time of new session, they never want to miss the peak opportunity, so they also visit school to school with heavy commission to lure them. Some boarding schools have also been found selling the text books from their own school premises without even a single percent of discount citing the deal with Indian market or pressure from publication.

Because of the game of commission between school and book stall, the guardians have badly been affected. The market price hike of books with no discount and compulsion of buying schools goods from a particular stall have almost broken the backbone of consumers. On the other hand, lack of clear provision fro the punishment of the book stalls cheating the consumers, has merely encouraged them to do so without a hitch. A particular book from a particular publication has also helped a lot in the game of commission triangularly, i.e. schools, book-stalls and publishers but it is the guardians who suffer every year. There’s no mechanism to curb such black-market from which they are making billions of rupees illegally.